Love Thy Neighbor

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove On Race, Faith, And Resistance

Most black evangelicals didn’t vote for him. Most Latino evangelicals didn’t vote for him. But 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

The Salt Seas Of The Heart

A Tribute To Brian Doyle

You believed that everything is a form of prayer, including laughter, including tears. Yes, you were a reverential man, but you weren’t stiff or boring or preachy or dour. Your essays were both concise — often just a page in length — and lush, your sentences as intricate and twisty as plants in a terrarium. You combined prose and poem (and prayer, you said) to bear witness to the miracles around us.

Inventory

On Reading The Papers Of Richard M. Stites, Esq., At The Georgia Historical Society In Savannah

I spread out your charts, your ledgers, your bug-eaten accounts, the ones cataloged and filed in acid-free folders. The room where I sit, Mr. Stites, is not far from the room where you yourself must have sat, sweat-stained, surrounded by your law books, sleeves rolled up, face sopping wet, bent over your volumes. Adding, subtracting, calculating, measuring, devising. Not far from where your slaves stood in pens waiting to be sold.

Catching The Westbound

When my father died, he left two letters in separate envelopes, both marked “To be opened at my death.” One is addressed to my brother and me. The other is to his wife.

Stop Hitting Yourself

I was twenty-six, working full time at the Bagelry in suburban Chicago, avoiding the future. The future did not seem like anything you could count on. Even in suburban Chicago, where Public Works employees smiled while scraping up roadkill, people were unhappy, desperate to convince themselves of something good. Desperate.

Dunkin’ Donuts

It was worth getting out of bed in the cold dark / for an early doctor’s appointment / to find this bright donut shop where I sit / with my medium coffee, cream and sugar

The Identity Repairman

I am rooted. / Ask the land. / I am lyric. / Ask the sea.